In the current business environment, effective management of software product development and its release are critical to the success of Information Technology (IT) organizations. Various project management techniques have been developed in an effort to manage software product development and its subsequent release. Although these project management techniques enable timely completion of the software product developments, product managers continue to find it difficult to predict risk involved for upcoming software releases. Reliable prediction of the risks associated with software product releases may enable product managers to take necessary steps to minimize the same before releases.
Currently, during software production release, effective prioritization of the business requirements and base stability of the product is not measured so as to mitigate the risks and failures. Hence, business requirements and new components enter into the production without any impact analysis and risk mitigation, thereby leading to critical defects uncovered in the production. It is preferable to identify and correct defects as soon as possible in a software product development.
The risk analysis and prioritization is done manually by a business user and is therefore error-prone. There is no systematic way for identifying the risk in base system and prioritization of project requirements in the release, which leads to lack of confidence within different business stakeholders. For example, the monitoring done by the support team are usually increased during the release of patches which in turn not only increases the business spend for a particular release but also adversely impacts the customer experience.
The above discussed issues may lead to slippage of critical defects to production cycles that may sometimes result in rollback of a release. For example, the release may be delayed or rolled back because of defective code and enormous support requirement. Eventually, an organization's reputation and competitiveness may be impacted as time to market for software product release is interrupted. In short, existing software production release risk determination techniques do not completely address the issues stated above.